Gleason's Sporting World: Early returns not promising for Yanks, Mets

Points to ponder while wondering if baseball trends can start to take shape just four games into the season.

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By Kevin Gleason

recordonline.com

By Kevin Gleason

Posted Apr. 7, 2013 at 2:00 AM

By Kevin Gleason
Posted Apr. 7, 2013 at 2:00 AM

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Points to ponder while wondering if baseball trends can start to take shape just four games into the season.

We had witnessed only about 2.5 percent of the regular season heading into the weekend. And yet it took little imagination to feel a maddening trend of light hitting, shaky fielding and lousy relieving costing the Mets far more games than their starting pitching this year.

Mets starters pitched to a 1.38 ERA and went at least six innings in the first four games. And what did they have to show for it? A whopping 2-2 record.

Over in the Bronx, the Yankees finally have absorbed some of the Mets' luckless inability to keep players healthy. Hiroki Kuroda takes Shane Victorino's shot off his pitching hand. Though apparently unscathed, Kuroda took the kind of shot that seems to have become a daily occurrence with players wearing Mets jerseys in recent years. Eduardo Nunez, already filling in at shortstop, gets hit in the right biceps with a pitch. And those cases don't include the Yankee players unable to make it to opening day.

It is easy to forget that the Yanks withstood a whole bunch of injuries in the first half of last season. The difference, of course, is that those injuries were to Joba Chamberlain and Brett Gardner and Michael Pineda and David Robertson — not Mark Teixeira and Curtis Granderson and Derek Jeter and even Alex Rodriguez.

Even in losing Mariano Rivera for much of last season, the Yanks were able to plug in a proven closer, Rafael Soriano. Now the Yanks must hang near the top of a deep division without at least three stars — A-Rod no longer fits the category — and make a run when they approach full strength around June.

By then, almost half the season will be over.

By then, the Mets and Yankees could have a lot more in common than New York addresses.

Can you believe we live in an era when Robinson Cano, making $15 million this season before the real dough arrives in ensuing years, feels the need to fire the agent who secured his $57 million contract.

Not that I feel any sense of sadness or loyalty toward Scott Boras, who should be able to afford his bills by now. But it's a mad, mad business world when Cano feels the need to hire new representation, in this case an agency run by Jay-Z, to secure a mammoth long-term deal that you or I could close.

You have to wonder about Major League Baseball overseeing any kind of drug program when it managed to sue the wrong person for allegedly being connected to a black-market performance-enhancing clinic.

MLB reportedly released Paulo da Silveira from its complaint, saying, "He had no connection to Biogenesis or to the alleged distribution of performance-enhancing substances to Major League players.''

ESPN's "Outside the Lines'', which is on an impressive run of breaking stories, reported that MLB was looking for someone with a similar name believed to be connected to Anthony Bosch, operator of the Biogenesis of America clinic in Florida.

Imagine suing the wrong guy for something? I can't either.

But I can imagine Mr. da Silveira using pinpoint accuracy to name the victims in a counter suit. All he has to do is remember three letters: M-L-B.

The NFL has released its preseason schedule, providing ample time to plan other events for those August days and nights when meaningless football games attempt to invade our lives.

Rutgers should be overjoyed in one sense. When is the last time anybody was talking about its men's basketball program leading to the Final Four?

Josh Hamilton hit .305 with 142 home runs and 506 RBI in five seasons with the Rangers. He made five All-Star games, won a Most Valuable Player award, helped Texas reach consecutive league championship series. So how did the majority of Rangers fans show their appreciation for Hamilton upon his first visit to Texas as a member of the Angels?

They booed him.

Who knows, maybe they got him mixed up with the quarterback who plays home games nearby.

So the guy who gets to keep his job at Rutgers says he didn't bother watching a videotape supplied to him in November of Mike Rice abusing basketball players. Just didn't bother watching it.

The guy who gets to keep his job finally comes around to watching the tape on Tuesday, hours after it has been shown all over television and the Internet.

The guy who gets to keep his job, same guy entrusted with running a major university, somehow manages to blame everybody except Pope Francis and himself for Rice remaining employed that long.

The guy who gets to keep his job even blamed his laptop for being incompatible to the DVD of Rice losing it during practice.

This was one remarkable stunt pulled off by Rutgers president Robert Barchi. Just incredible.